In Defense of Jack Johnson

So.  Jack Johnson just released another album.  From Here to Now To You it's called.  Debuted at number 1 on Billboard and everything (granted, debuting number 1 in the internet-download age ain't nearly as impressive as it used to be--on a side note, I still think breaking the cultural-hegemony of corporate-produced pop is for the best, but that's a topic for another day).

Yet there's been a curious lack of, well, anything, about it--no reviews, retrospectives, articles, promotions, nada.  Apparently the war has been both won and lost: If you already like him, you probably got his new album; if not, well, this ain't what'll finally win you over.  Jack Johnson is simply one of those things that's always around now, in the background.  It's not like he's going to release some psychedelic prog-rock masterpiece, so he's nothing to get worked up about, or even backlashing against, apparently.  He conquered the music charts just in time for everyone to quit caring.

Not that I don't get the collective shrug that greets every new Jack Johnson release nowadays: you can only hear so many High School guitar students strum out "Flake," or hear "Bubble Toes" in so many Starbucks, before you start to roll your eyes and tune him out.  "All his songs sound the same!" is a common complaint.  And it's true, he doesn't stray very far from his laid-back beach-vibe (though to an Ocean child like myself, decrying Jack Johnson's beach vibe is like complaining that ice cream is delicious).

And it's not like I listen to him much anymore myself; he's not nearly as eclectic or innovative as, say, Andrew Bird or Sufjan Stevens.  At some point he just sort of became the background music of my college years.  But then, I guess that's exactly why I feel this need to defend a musician who probably doesn't need defending (it's not like anyone's attacking): he's always been there for me.  Brushfire Fairytales came out my freshman year of college; On and On during my mission; In Between Dreams during my BA; Sleep Through the Static start of my MA; To The Sea end of my MA; and I like to think it's not coincidental that his latest came out start of my PhD, in the nick of time, to calm me as he always has at times of great upheaval in my life.

But he doesn't just calm me, you see: I maintain that his music is genuinely meditative, and not in that cheap stoner "we're all just drops in the ocean Man" sort of way.  He's not only quiet, he's nuanced, coloring his music with subtle shades of meaning and affectation that require a calm mind to even notice, let alone appreciate (which is perhaps why it "all sounds the same" to some busy people).

Moreover, there is an intense undercurrent of melancholy that runs throughout his music--whether or not you're a fan, you're missing the whole point if you just treat him as bubble-gum pop for a frat party or a mid-brow coffee garden or weed-filled music festival.  Chillaxing escapism his music is not.  Quite the contrary.

Take for example the aforementioned "Flake" and "Bubble Toes", songs that really do get overplayed, such that you've perhaps forgotten that "Flake" is about an irresponsible man burdened by his shame for letting down his lover yet again, or that the sprightliness of "Bubble Toes" is based on "feet infested with tar balls and scars."  Consider this: there is a dark history behind every upbeat Jack Johnson melody.  Any good vibe he delivers is hard-earned.  His beautiful women all have scarred feet.

And those are just the hits from his debut Brushfire Fairytales.  "Fortunate Fools", "F-Stop Blues" and "Losing Hope" dominate the track listing; "Posters" features an unloved drunk who "has the nerve to say he needs a decent girl"; a million people die on "The News" tonight, and his Mother's only comfort is to lie and say the news ain't real;  album-closer "It's All Understood" features haunting ghosts, religious doubt and loss of faith; "Mudfootball" is upbeat, "but only because we thought/that everything good always would remain."

Brushfire's intro "Inaudible Melodies" has the deeply cynical lines "Dust off your thinking caps" and "We are only what we hate."  This UC Santa Barbara film student pleads with everyone to "slow down" so that film frames can catch you, and insists that "silent films are full of sound";  maybe I've been studying too much Post-Structuralism and New Media theory lately, but this idea that meaning and sense lies within the absences and silences, between notes, between frames, is deeply Wittgensteinian, even Derridian, and suggest that Johnson is more than just another faux-profound  surf-bum.

"Times Like These," the opener for his 2003 album On and On, I think captures the deep malaise of post-9/11 America better than the Foo Fighters song of the same name and time.  In one throw-away lyric, "God bless these ones/not those ones/but these ones," Jack Johnson contains the entire weary rhetoric of Arab-Muslim and American-Christian extremists shouting at and bombing each other.  When everyone is screaming, Jack Johnson intuitively understands that a hushed whisper can be the most menacing of all. 

The rest of the album is no cheerier: he lambasts environmental destruction at the hands of corporate-imperialists (as only a native Hawaiian would understand) in "The Horizon Has Been Defeated."  This quiet man considers screaming in "Traffic in the Sky," traces the webs of blame in a school-shooting in "Cookie Jar", and warns that "Taylor's gonna run away."  He laments that "Things were so much simpler when/stars were still just the holes to heaven."  In the deceptively low-key album closer "Symbol in my Driveway," he cautions "I have a light-bulb full of anger/and I can switch it off and on," as he wonders "how pathetic" and "how destructive" we can be, for "They've got us fooled."  Johnson was years ahead of much of America in comprehending the Iraq War.

He cheers up on In Between Dreams, but not completely: on "Sitting, Waiting, Wishing," he casually articulates what every young person in love hates to learn, "That just because you love someone/don't make them love you."  He openly asks "where did the good people go."  ("And we thought this was low...") He "needs this old train/to break down."  The doctors give his friend "two weeks to live/I'd give him more/if I could," but he can't.  Even in the sappy love song "Do You Remember," a tree house burns down, of which he's got a photo "that I don't like to look at." 

What's more, his cheerier mood doesn't last: on Sleep Through the Static, released near the end of the grinding drag that was the Bush administration, he croons, "All at once/the world can overwhelm me/there's almost nothing that you can tell me/that could ease my mind."  He delivers the saddest money line of all: "Sometimes it feels like a heart is no place to be singing from at all."  That tone of dread pervades the entire album, even at its most gorgeous.  Again, Johnson nails the zeitgeist without even trying. 

To The Sea cheers up...somewhat...for again, the opener sounds like a happy surf song, until the lyrics declare: "You and your heart/shouldn't feel so far apart," asking "Why you gotta break it and make it feel so hard," deriding this "broken king" who "Lays in the sun/like pieces of broken glass" and "loses the fingernails in your hand."  It's only a happy song if you're not paying attention.  Same goes for almost every other song on this album.  Jack Johnson understands, as every Ocean child does, that going to the sea isn't an escape, but a confrontation--a therapeutic one yes, but still a confrontation. "You don't love," he sings to the sea, "But oh, you don't hate."

I haven't heard the new album yet (I anachronistically still insist on purchasing music, but also refuse to pay outrageous new-release prices--if nothing else, Jack Johnson has taught me to be still and wait).  But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to hear from this old friend, from this man who's understood all along the deep tragedy that's rooted in every genuine smile.  I promise I'm not proselyting, if you didn't already like him, this ain't what'll convert you.  But I would like him to not be dismissed quite as indifferently as he's come to be.  Don't be fooled by his laid-back vibe: his feet are all covered with scars.